Menu

#cedem13 Day 2 afternoon, Reflections

5-minute Reflections on….

….E-Participation, E-Government, E-Voting

Marko M. Skoric, Nathaniel Dunbar Poor

Barriers to Entry and Online Political Activism. Slacktivism has pre-internet origins and does not require a high level of involvement. Slacktivism is motivated by selfishness and narcisitic reasons, constructing an online identify etc.. Pros are lowering the barrier for participation, raising awareness; Cons: Slacktivism has little to no impact on political outcome.

Damien Mac Namara, Paul Gibson, Ken Oakley

Just like a paper. Ireland is funding the eVoting project DualVote. Development of a pen and paper based e-voting system. 26 commercial e-voting systems have been classified in 5 categories: error-feedback, duality generation, interface modality, machine authentication, ballot confirmation, 14. In future, the classification will be directly linked to make usability statements concerning the eVoting systems.

Technology for participation Technology is to facilitate access to the voting apparatus, yet fails to motivate participation effectively. Vasiliy created a classification system which helps to classify voting systems. He introduced a new concept of social verification if someone voted, instead or in addition to mathematical verification.

Klaus John

Proxy Authenticator Approach of a Signature based Single Sign on Proxy Solution for e-Government Applications. Klaus explains how authentication of the Austrian eID system works using PKCS#12. Challenges were that standards like SAML were not allowed to be used. Essentially it boils down to an SSL-Certificate stored locally on the computer which is used to encrypt the connection.A technical e-delivery solution developed by the BRZ (Austrian Federal Computing Center) for http://www.help.gv.at, the official Austrian e-government / information channel.

…..Research Issues

Anders O. Larsson, Jakob Svensson

Research Politicans online: The researchers identified four directions of research: Research should attempt to move beyond dichotomies, research should focus on everyday practices, research should focus on the micro level of study & research should adopt integrative approaches.

Network user activities as a reflection of real life. Radomir presented the topic of social media usage in Russia and how the government is reacting on it. The sociodynamics project is crawling social networks to identify topics, how they evolve, and how groups peer.

Irmgard Wetzstein, Peter Leitner

Social media analytics for sustainable migrant integration policies. Social media analysis tools are mostly used for marketing purposes. The goal of the uniteEurope project is to create a web based service which will be provided as Software as a Service, providing sentiment analysis.

Ivo Babaja

The right to information as a question of public sovereignty. Ivo addressed the question why the administration is seeking for openness and participation. He argues that a main driver is popular sovereignity with technology opening up more possibilities to execute that sovereignty. Public administration services should be designed with citizens as the primary information client.

……Cases

Simon Dalfert

Transparency, the Council of the EU and its General Secretariat. The European council is probably the most intransparent EU body. However there are two legal obligations to be met, also by the council, which make it not as intransparent as it might be perceived. Information has to be released in a more timely manner as has been in the past. The goal is not to make more information available, but to make existing information more accessible. Political process should be so transparent, that every information detail gets interlinked. One part in doing so is to agree on metadata standards. Information will be released in an open data compatible way.

Bojan Cestnik, Alenka Kern

Refining public sector services by harvesting creativity, spontaneous creativity and creative reasoning. This creativity can be supported by text mining, automatic ontology creation, etc. Challenges are to identify outlier documents first not to taint the result, and, especially in outlier documents valuable information might be hidden.

Peter Ninian Gregson

Edinburgh Council Whistleblowing – a petition for Change. His presentation is on setting up mechanisms for whistleblowing on public authority (mis-)management and the impact social media may have. For example, who is doing the agenda setting? A proposed solution would be a whistleblower hotline. In administration, social media is “a whole new risk”.

Carol Soon

The changing face to womens movement in Singapore: 1950 saw a plethora of womens association. This was during the British colony time. 1980 – 1990 era, when the one party state was erected, many movements where “consolidated”. Her reasoning is that mobilization through internet has very limited effect on the womens movement: The internet supports different womens groups, e.g. for networking and fulfilling informational and interaction rather than for mobilization.